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Since Jesus came into my heart, what a wonderful change in my life has been wrought. Since Jesus came into my heart, I have light in my soul which long I had sought.

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Since Jesus came into my heart. Let's all stand as we sing together Number 301, the first three stanzas. [MUSIC - "THE CHANGES IN MY LIFE"]

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(SINGING) A wonderful change in my life ♪ My life has been wrong since Jesus came into my heart ♪ ♪ I have lied in my soul for which long I have sought ♪ ♪ Since Jesus came into my heart ♪

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♪ Since Jesus came into my heart ♪ ♪ Since Jesus came into my heart ♪ ♪ The fire in my soul I will sing and roar ♪ ♪ Since Jesus came into my heart ♪

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♪ I have ceased from my wondering and going ♪ ♪ I pray since Jesus came into my heart ♪ ♪ And my sins get forbidden ♪ ♪ And all was to blame ♪

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♪ Since Jesus came into the world ♪ ♪ Since Jesus came into the world ♪ ♪ Since Jesus came into the world ♪ ♪ Let the joy of my soul ♪

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♪ Like a seed be all the world ♪ ♪ Since Jesus came into my heart ♪ ♪ I'm possessed of a hope that is steadfast and sure ♪ ♪ Since Jesus came into my heart ♪

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♪ And no dark clouds have found my path where I'm near ♪ ♪ Since Jesus came into my heart ♪ (chanting) ♪ Jesus, you're the King of all ♪

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♪ Jesus, you're the King of all ♪ ♪ Jesus, you're the King of all ♪ ♪ Jesus, you're the King of all ♪ May we bow our heads.

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Come into our hearts, Lord Jesus. Come in today, come in to stay. Come into our hearts, Lord Jesus. Amen.

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In the gospel according to St. Matthew the fifth chapter the eighth verse are these words, "Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God." Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God. the subject of the message is a clean heart, a clean heart. In the Bible, the heart is

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considered far more than an ordinary organ of the body. The heart is considered as the source of one's existence, it is the center of one's being, it is the motivating and controlling factor in one's life. The heart is called the seat of one's emotions. Fear, love, courage, anger, joy, sorrow, and hatred all have their dwelling place in the heart. So the heart is the center of the moral,

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spiritual, and intellectual life. It is said that the heart is the seat of a person's conscience and one's life. So in the proclamation concerning the kingdom, and what some have chosen to call the Magna Carta of the kingdom of God, in Jesus' description of the happy life, one of the guidelines is this word, "Blessed are the pure in heart." Many think that happiness is something

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which can be sought and caught. Some think that happiness is in riches, that if they are able to accumulate a vast amount of wealth, that that in itself will make them happy. But they have in some instances succeeded in accumulating a vast amount of wealth only to discover that happiness has eluded them. Some think that happiness is in having comfort, ease, luxury, convenience,

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and they have been able to acquire these things, an abundance of the push-button gadgets of our culture, only to discover that happiness has still eluded them. For happiness consists not in an abundance of things. Happiness is not an achievement, rather it is an attitude. It is not something that comes by certain things that we do. Some people are

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running themselves to death trying to be happy. But happiness you see is like that hidden treasure which Jesus describes in one of his parables, the hidden treasure in a field. It's not something that we can achieve by ourselves but it is a gift. So you see it does not come in quantity, it's not how much of the things of this world that one may possess, not

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how many cars, how much land, how much of the or how many of the gadgets that we may have, no these are not the essentials of the happy life. Happiness is not in the quantity of human existence, but rather happiness is in the quality of one's life. Let's consider at least two aspects of the happy life. And one is that an individual is made perfect by his vision of life,

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the way he sees life, one's perspective, the way one looks at himself or herself, as well as how one looks at the world. This is one of the guidelines for being happy. How do you see life? How do you look at yourself? How do you see the world around you? For our vision, our perspective will determine whether or not we are on the road of happiness. And then secondly,

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one receives happiness in the way that one is rightly related to others. Jesus says here, "Blessed are the pure in heart." The people who crucified our Lord were not right in their hearts. Their hearts were like cesspools of pollution. They possessed evil hearts. They looked good on the outside, they were the best-dressed

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people. The leaders were the most prominent individuals in that society. They look good on the outside, they wore their long flowing robes that were expensive and exquisitely tailored. They were persons who contributed their tithes and their offerings, they were faithful in church attendance, they read the Bible,

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they attended prayer meeting, but their hearts were not right. They looked the part, they acted the part, but there is a difference between being and acting and And that's why Jesus compared them to a cup that is clean on the outside and dirty on the inside. He spoke of them as being like beautiful, whited tombs glistening in the sunlight.

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And inside there is the foul and filthy odor that comes from dead men's bones. So one of the prized possessions of the happy life is purity of heart, purity of heart.

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To be real, not to be false. To just be what you are, to be what you are designed to be, what the Creator set forth for us to be, the kind of life, his divine design.

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No make believe, no counterfeit, no mixture, but unadulterated, sincere, purity of heart. Soren Kierkegaard says that purity of heart

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is to will one thing. So the reason many people are so unhappy, so mixed up, so confused about themselves and the world is that there is double-mindedness

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going off in all directions, Not really knowing what one should do and trying to be everything to everybody. And the scripture says that the double-minded person

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is unstable in all his ways, but singleness of heart. That is what is meant by purity of heart. To have oneself together, to be united and really have singleness of purpose.

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To have that goal which is pleasing in the sight of God, purity of heart, that is to will one thing. That's what Kierkegaard said, purity of heart is to will one thing.

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Oh, so often we find ourselves straddled a fence. We wanna be on this side, and we also wanna be on that side. And we really don't know where we wanna be,

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So we try to play it safe and we find ourselves splintered and we find ourselves with a fractured personality and yet to be happy there must be singleness of heart. The heart must be together. are the pure in heart. Well you see purity of heart involves humility and

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reverence toward material things. If your heart is right you're going to treat God's creation right if your heart's right. We talk about ecology and all of those things but all of that has to do with the heart. In other words when people really don't care they will pollute the streams, they will misuse the land, they

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will misuse the dog, they'll misuse the cat because they really don't care. Heart is not right. They'll misuse the house, any material things. Anything that they touch they somehow misuse it. They aren't concerned about the upkeep of the yard, the upkeep of the house, any of these things because

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they are somehow wrong and the heart is is polluted. But when there is a humility and when there is a reverence toward material things that one somehow sees in in the material things, one recognizes that here we have before us the creative work of God.

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That even here in this flower there is the hand of God and when I see in the beautiful flower the hand of God, then I'm going to be concerned about how I handle the flowers. said, "Don't crush the daisies." Somehow this reflects one's vision of life, how one handles God's creation. So it means a certain way of treating the earth. For

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if one's heart is not right, we will misuse and abuse God's creation. But when the heart is right we see the hand of God in his creative world. There is humility and there is reverence. The pure in heart see the world as God's eternal provision for our eternal destiny. And one has a different way of living when

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you look upon the world as being God's garden and that God has somehow prepared this garden for his creatures and that all of the creation is somehow to be used for the glory of God. There's a different way of living when one looks at life in this way. A person whose heart is polluted has a threefold violence. He

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He does violence to himself, he does violence to nature, and he does violence to the creatures when one's heart is polluted. What is going to be good to somebody else when the person isn't going to be good to himself?

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The saying is be good to yourself because if you're going to be good to yourself, if you're really good to yourself, if the real stream, the source of your being is good, then that which radiates from that stream is going to be good. That's why Jesus says here, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for the person whose heart is

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right. We'll will one thing. Oh I know sometimes we find ourselves all disturbed about whether people are saying and what they're doing and we would like to please this group we would like to please that group and another group but if you're pure in heart that is to will one thing and that one thing is to please God that's all that's all. One thing please God, seek ye first the kingdom of God

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and his righteousness and you don't have to worry about anything else just purity of heart singleness of purpose purity of heart that's really what Jesus is saying to us here one goal one all-consuming passion, and that is to please God. So when one has purity of heart there is a kind of wholeness. We use the word you get to get oneself together, getting it

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all together. There's a kind of wholeness, there's a kind of unity, there's a kind of harmony in one's life. For there is the union of self and other things. Can rightly relate oneself to the quick created world around us. Can rightly relate to others when the heart is right. but we can never be happy, we can never be right with the world, we can never be right with others

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when the heart is not right. Dr. Bernard in South Africa and Dr. Bakey here in Texas have gained a distinguished reputation for themselves as heart surgeons. They've demonstrated the ability to to operate on the most delicate organ, the most significant, the human heart. And they've shown how heart problems can be corrected, how an old heart can be exchanged, made new, how a heart can

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be repaired, and how one can even have a new heart. And to the amazement of us all, we have seen this take place within our time. So that now heart surgery is almost commonplace. So much heart trouble and yet we've come to see a remedy for the troubled heart. There is another kind of heart trouble that is is not physical, it's it's not the organ of the physical body. It's a kind

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of heart trouble that is spiritual. There's so many things that trouble the heart, there's so many things that plague us, there's so many things that disturb us and cause us to lie awake at night that we may somehow attribute to heart trouble. Is there anyone who can help us? One who understands our heart.

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Sometimes we ignore, we neglect, and we fail to appreciate the one who can help us. We have our problems here in America. We're a fluent nation. We have our problems in every area of life. We have our problems in education. We have our problem in the business world. We have our problems in the church.

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most of it when we get right down to it we can trace to the fact that our hearts are not right and Jesus points up this word for us blessed are the pure in heart who can help us who is it that really understands our hearts who is it that somehow we can say of him that before him all hearts are open and no

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secrets are hid. Who is it? Jesus is the one. Peter Marshall tells a story of a little town that had a stream that ran down from the source of it from the hills, ran down in the midst of that town and it was something that gave life to the town, the crystal pure waters were used. They somehow gave the source of

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radiance in that little town. Children prayed around the stream laughing. House wives went on their journeys to the marketplace, husbands were going to their jobs, they all passed by this little stream. But high, high, high up in the hills there was one who was known as the keeper of the springs. People didn't think about him very much but he was up

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there in the hills alone keeping watch seeing to it that the delicate machinery was always functioning keeping it from getting clogged up he just did his work up there as the keeper of the Springs. One day the City Council met these were hardball businessmen and they began to scan the civic budget and the keeper of

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the purse noticed that there was one listed there as the keeper of the springs. He said, "What does this fellow do?" "We don't need him, he's just a romance ranger and we can save some money by striking him from the budget." And so they did. And after a time the machinery didn't function so well and there was a

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green scum that gathered around it and clogged it up and after a while disease infected the community and children were sick and homes were threatened not only with sickness and disease but threatened by death. And again the City Council met and they restored in the budget the allocation for the keeper of the springs

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and this romance ranger that they had called him began once more to do his work. And once more the stream was clear and pure and once more there was a radiance of life and there was happiness in the community because of the keeper of the springs was there during his work high up in the hills. And we need that

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one to keep our hearts. We need that one to purge our hearts and to cleanse our hearts of all righteousness we need the keeper of the springs. He's the one that enables us to have a pure heart, enables us to think as we ought to think. What ought we to have from a pure heart? Well we ought to think about those things that are just, think

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about those things that are true, think about those things that are lovely, think about those things that are pure when the keeper of the springs is somehow keeping our heart, the source of our being as it ought to be. Bless it.

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Are the pure at heart. have wholeness, they'll have salvation, they'll have joy, but then there comes a promise, "For they shall see God." They shall see the presence of the eternal in the land of the living. Some people can't see God working in history, but the pure

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in heart are able to see it. Well there is a scene there in the book of Esther the first chapter in the 14th verse it talks about the King Asaverus and around him are seven princes of Media and Persia and they are the ones that are privileged because they are right around the king they are privileged to see the King's face. The pure in heart of those who live close to God,

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and because they live close to God, because they are rightly related to him, they're privileged to see the King's face. So if we would walk with God, if we would somehow hold his hand, if we would somehow have that happiness and have that love that causes us to walk on the highway of holiness and to see God's face in peace, our

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Our hearts must be pure. Our hearts must be cleansed of evil thoughts. And then we shall know that happiness, that wholeness, that harmony, that holiness that is the gift of the pure

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hard. Oh it's rather difficult to have a pure heart in a world like this, very hard. So much is happening all around us, people doing so much to us, and it's very hard to have a pure heart. Reinhold Niebuhr says it's like trying to catch Pure fish, clean fish in a contaminated stream.

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And so it would seem from a human standpoint that it's impossible, but that's what God does. He makes the impossible possible. We can't do it ourselves.

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We can't have a pure heart just by having a little formula like every day and every way I'm getting better and better, no. God has to do it.

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That's the mystery of our history that God can do it and he will do it. So as we sing now, give me a clean heart. We ask God to perform a miracle in our lives as he has performed a miracle in the lives of so many.

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It's a prayer that somehow we ought to pray every day, every way. Give me a clean heart. And as we sing, we extend the privilege of... [BLANK_AUDIO]